… American spies are not the only ones who have dealt with Russians claiming to have secrets [about Trump] to sell. Cody Shearer, an American political operative with ties to the Democratic Party, has been crisscrossing Eastern Europe for more than six months to secure the purported kompromat from a different Russian, said people familiar with the efforts, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging their relationship with him.

Reached by phone late last year, Mr. Shearer would say only that his work was “a big deal — you know what it is, and you shouldn’t be asking about it.” He then hung up. …

Cody Shearer is the son of Clinton-connected celebrity gossip columnist Lloyd Shearer, a.k.a., Walter Scott, author of “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade” in that Parade magazine that came with the Sunday paper. From Lloyd Shearer’s 1991 obituary in the NYT:

Lloyd Shearer, a Hollywood fixture whose Personality Parade column in Parade magazine reached as many as 50 million readers in its heyday, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 84. …

”What Skip ran was basically a kind of journalistic government in exile out in California,” said the author Richard Reeves, who met Mr. Shearer in the 1960′s while covering Robert F. Kennedy. ”If you were from New York or Washington or England, he would be your guide to the mysteries of California.”

Among the politicians and journalists at Mr. Shearer’s home you might find a young couple with political ambitions named Bill and Hillary Clinton, college friends of his elder son, Derek. (Years later, after Mr. Clinton did rather well in politics, Derek Shearer was named ambassador to Finland; his sister, Brooke, became a senior adviser to the secretary of the interior; and a sign was erected over Lloyd Shearer’s guest house: ”Bill Clinton slept here.”)

In a family of high achievers, Cody’s name gets mentioned less often.

Or you might see Henry A. Kissinger at Mr. Shearer’s house. Although Mr. Shearer was critical of the war in Vietnam and made President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list, he retained his friendship with Mr. Kissinger. Mr. Shearer particularly enjoyed sending tenderly (and fraudulently) inscribed photographs of starlets to Mr. Kissinger — but only when he knew the White House staff would see them.

Cody Shearer’s beautiful twin sister Brooke, who died in 2009, was a “private investigator” and a Clinton campaign aide.

From her 2009 L.A. Times obituary:

During the 1992 presidential campaign, she was Hillary Clinton’s personal aide or “friend, advisor, short-order cook,” as the irreverent Shearer once put it.

[Bush] developed an intense dislike for the class of Yalie he deemed “intellectual snobs.” To Bush, the epitome of the type was Strobe Talbott, the current Deputy Secretary of State. Talbott (a distant relative of Bush) was one of the class of 1968′s most ambitious brains–editor of the Daily News, Rhodes scholar roommate at Oxford to Bill Clinton, and before joining the Clinton Administration, career journalist for Time magazine, specializing in defense and foreign policies. “Strobe was the kind of person George could not stand,” says Robert Birge, who was a member with Bush in Skull & Bones, a Yale secret society. “He was appalled by people like Strobe. I don’t know why, but it was a real issue with him.”

Strobe, so far as I can tell, was not in Skull and Bones with Bush:

Rob Reiner's new movie's about CIA tapping spies at Skull & Bones. Members of that society must now leave the room. http://t.co/4OyTlTsA8W.

At Oxford, Talbott translated Khrushchev’s memoirs and became close friends with fellow Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton. Strobe went on to become a big wheel at Time Magazine and during the 1980s Nuclear Freeze movement wrote thunderous cover stories about how Reagan’s foreign policy would end in catastrophe.

Despite matters not working out quite as Strobe had forecasted so publicly so often, his Oxford buddy Bill put him in charge of US relations with the post-Soviet Union and then promoted him to #2 in the State Department. When Al Gore lost to Bush and then Hillary lost to Obama in 2008, Strobe consoled himself with the presidency of the Brookings Institution from 2002-onward. Finally, in the wake of Hillary losing to Trump, he retired from the top job at Brookings in 2017.

Cody Shearer appears to have gone into the family trade of private investigator/gossip, although in recent decades his findings have less often appeared in print. Perhaps they tend to be funneled to Clinton consigliereSidney Blumenthal for creative suggestions to Hill and Bill on how to deploy them?